Merging Life Skills and Academic Rigor

Ford PAS curriculum prepares students for college

Stephen Krupka, a junior at the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technology Center (the Met School) in Providence,
Rhode Island, has wanted to be a chef ever since he learned to cook at
home. “I’ve always been interested in cooking and I watch a lot of the
cooking shows on television,” he says. “I like the art and creativity of cooking.”

Krupka has taken his love of cooking into
his business entrepreneurship class and has started to learn how he
could convert that passion into a profession. Like hundreds of students
around the country who are using the Ford Partnership for Advanced
Studies curriculum (Ford PAS), Krupka is exploring a variety of
business, engineering, and technology challenges designed to prepare
him for postsecondary education and the workplace.

Known
for its academic rigor—many of the participating sites offer college
credit for the course—and hands-on activities, Ford PAS is also
renowned for its adaptability. High schools around the country have
developed creative and challenging courses with the curriculum modules
all in hopes of setting the stage for their students’ advancement to higher education.

Throughout
its five courses, Ford PAS fuses its academic, business, and technology
subject matter with the life skills that high school students are
working to develop, such as critical thinking, problem-solving,
teamwork, communication, and personal management. The modules, which
emphasize student participation and contributions, begin with an
introduction to the world of business, product development, and
manufacturing and go on to explore how businesses adapt to change, how
decision makers use and manage data, and how designers are meeting
twenty-first century challenges. The final section covers basic
principles of the global economy.
“Ford PAS helps students develop academic knowledge and practical
skills that allow them to enter college and the workforce with
confidence and competence,” says Jim Padilla, president and chief
operating officer of Ford Motor Company. “We’re optimistic that Ford
PAS graduates will be among the leaders of the next generation of
science, engineering, and business professionals.”

The
sites that use Ford PAS are intent on providing students with links to
higher education. The Met School, for example, is an alternative high
school that has jettisoned traditional grades and schoolwide lesson
plans and instead allows students, working with a close group of
advisors, to customize their learning paths and experience real-life
work. The school’s focus on internships and projects—long-term,
multifaceted, hands-on activities—makes the Met a fitting home for the
Ford PAS materials. The curriculum is filled with student-created
project activities, which become the means to learn about planning,
troubleshooting, implementation, and follow up.

The Met
School is a Big Picture School, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which draws a largely disadvantaged, at-risk student body.
Almost all of the Met’s students go on to college—and three-quarters of
them are the first in their families to attend college.

Using
Ford PAS as a vehicle, high schools around the country are
strengthening their relationships with colleges and universities and
boosting their students’ readiness for higher education.

“It
is so exciting that this program is getting the support from Ford to
grow and be adapted in such diverse communities,” says Ilene Kantrov,
director of ERO.

The Business School Deans Roundtable at
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for example, has recently
launched a pilot program funded by Ford Motor Company Fund that will
introduce Ford PAS to predominantly African American high school
students who plan to go to college.

The collaboration “is
focused on enhancing a student’s possibility of going to college and
being successful in college,” says Barron Harvey, business dean at
Howard University in Washington and founding chair of the Roundtable.
“It also would probably highlight for the students who have not given
strong consideration to college more information about the skills they
will need to succeed in higher education.”

In a similar
endeavor to develop college-level skills among traditionally
underrepresented students, Ford Motor Company Fund and the National
Council of La Raza (NCLR) are folding Ford PAS into NCLR programs in
five sites and four locations participating in the Gates Foundation
Early College High School Initiative: Washington, D.C.; Milwaukee,
Wisconsin; Kansas City, Missouri; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

In
Miami, Ford PAS has become the instructional companion to an effort to
re-engage students in their educations and to build career
opportunities. Focusing on the needs of at-risk high school students,
mainly Latino youth, Hialeah Institute, an alternative school of 180
students, will integrate the curriculum in grades 9–12 in areas such as
design and product development, information systems, environmental
sustainability, global economics, business planning, and marketing.

The
program will “provide a high-quality learning experience,” says
Guarione Diaz, president of the Cuban American National Council (CNC),
which operates the school. A similar program will also be instituted at
CNC’s Little Havana Institute in Miami.

Ford PAS is
“proving to be an extraordinary attention-getter for the largely
at-risk, Hispanic populations we serve in our high schools and in an
out-of-school youth project,” notes Kevin Crain, vice president for
advancement and government affairs of CNC.

Business Plans

The
Ford PAS module “Managing and Marketing with Data,” which Stephen
Krupka and his classmates use in Providence, is a good example of the
many topic areas, skills, and ideas that the curriculum develops.

The
lessons culminate in the creation of business plans, students’ detailed
proposals to launch their own enterprises. As students work on their
plans, classes offer instruction and practice with
a host of business-oriented skills: designing marketing surveys and
collecting data, identifying a target audience, analyzing market survey
data, developing a marketing plan, budgeting for costs and revenues,
calculating profits and losses, completing a break-even analysis and an
analysis of the effect of supply and demand on prices. Students also
debate ethical issues involved in marketing.

Students
explore hypothetical cases, such as imagining themselves as marketing
consultants to a rock band that wants to expand its audience or a
company that wants to launch a new beverage to the youth market.
Through teamwork and independent research, students apply the lessons
of the scenarios to their own dream businesses.

In March,
Krupka presented to his classmates his plan to open The Met Bakery,
which would be located at the downtown campus of the Community College
of Rhode Island, with its six floors of classrooms and office space. In
his class presentation, he described his market survey, in which he
asked people in the building about what foods they wanted, assessed
which businesses he’d compete with, and noted strengths and weaknesses
of his plan. Krupka estimates he could have 3,000 daily customers.

“Why
would it succeed? The other products in the building are expensive and
the current businesses there have not generated strong customer
loyalty. I would mostly bake my own—about 200 pastries, muffins, and
bagels, but I’d also need to buy some items from others,” he says.

As
part of their learning, Krupka and his classmates use the Ford PAS Web
site, which provides student resources such as data spreadsheets,
on-line simulation software, links to a variety of Web resources,
extension activities, and supplementary materials and readings. The
Ford PAS print materials can be downloaded free or purchased at cost.
Ford Motor Company Fund supports teacher training and offers online
student and teacher centers on the Internet. The company also provides
the resources for sites to work with a variety of community partners to
facilitate field trips, locate guest speakers, and identify mentors
from the business community.

For the students at the Met,
the business plan is not a hypothetical project. It is their life dream
made concrete. “This is not just a school project. I really plan to do
this,” says Ciara Monroe, an eleventh grader who plans to work with
group homes to improve and expand their services to teens.